


bone saws

by spectrifical



Series: Coller Point [2]
Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Euthanasia, M/M, Poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-03
Updated: 2014-03-03
Packaged: 2018-01-14 10:03:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1262206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spectrifical/pseuds/spectrifical
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’d know that cover anywhere: the thin, delicate blue of an anatomical drawing of the bones of the hand in the upper right-hand corner. The stark white background. The letters printed in unobtrusive lowercase centered two-thirds of the way down in that same blue.</p>
            </blockquote>





	bone saws

The sudden, violent buzzing of Jim’s phone against his desk nearly launches him out of his chair. In the silence of his classroom long bereft of students, the punch of adrenaline that noise causes shatters his focus and sets his heart racing. Add to that the fact he doesn’t get text messages all that much, can go days without hearing from anyone, even forgets he has a phone sometimes—well, no one could blame him. He glances up at the clock. The large digital display beams a bright red 4:33 at him from beneath the intercom. Scrubbing his hand over the back of his neck, he looks down at the stack of papers he’s grading and gives it up as no good now that his concentration is well and truly shot.

Rifling through the papers, he congratulates himself on at least passing the halfway point. He figures he can take a break. An unchecked message will eat at his thoughts anyway. It could be important. Those are the only kind of messages worth sending, he supposes.

Besides that, there aren’t too many people who have his number. And of those who do, he knows which he wants it to be. He pushes the home key and grins when he sees that he’s in luck today.

It’s Leonard.

Leonard, who sends e-mails, who calls, who'd probably send a carrier pigeon if he had access to one. Leonard, who hasn’t texted Jim before. Jim swipes at the half-visible message on the screen and waits for the rest to pop up, curious beyond all reason and sense to know what it says in its entirety.

[04:33pm]  
 _McKenna asked to swap shifts, so I’m off this afternoon and heading to Coller Point for coffee. You’re welcome to join me if you’re so inclined._

Well, consider him charmed. Look at all that sentence structure. Does he proofread his text messages, too?

[04:33pm]  
 _its okay to abandon the shackles of proper punctuation i would know_

Multiple notifications come in before Jim can get a word in himself.

[04:34pm]  
 _That just means you should know better._  
 _So are you in?_  
 _It hasn’t been this pretty out in weeks._

Jim waits a few more moments for complete silence from Leonard before responding. Just when he thinks he’s safe to answer, a picture of the gazebo in Ridgeway Park rolls in and completes the collection of messages. He hopes anyway.

[04:35pm]  
 _so when you say youre heading to coller point you mean youre already right there_

[04:35pm]  
 _Yep. Here and waiting for an answer._  
 _No pressure either way._

Jim stuffs his students’ essays into a manila folder and then shoves that into his bag. He fumbles the strap over his shoulder and punches out a response. He’ll be useless for work until he meets up with Leonard now that the opportunity has presented itself anyway. Leonard is fun. Essays? Not so much.

[04:36pm]  
 _ill be there in 10 mins_

[04:36pm]  
 _Meet me by the gazebo._

Jim makes it in eight thanks to excellent timing with the lights and a prime parking spot. He squints up at the sky as he strides toward the gazebo. It really is sunny. The kind of sunny that requires sunglasses. Sunglasses Jim hadn’t thought to bring because he hadn’t expected to go anywhere besides work and home today. He spots Leonard by the top of his head, right where he said he’d be; he’s slouched down on a bench, neck and elbows supported by the back rest, _sunglasses_ perched precariously in his bangs.

Jim walks as quietly as possible, hoping to delay the moment Leonard notices his presence for as long as possible. His eyes are closed and a smile forces its way through his stubble. He looks amazing when he’s too busy just existing to be grumpy, as though the weight of thirty-seven years of life have had no effect on him. They’ve gone out a few times, and Leonard always puts up a show of good cheer underneath the gruffness, but it’s nice to see him without the permafurrow and powerscowl in place. Jim wants to learn how to make it happen. He steps closer to the bench.

“You’re blocking the light,” Leonard says, eyes still shut, and it’s true. Jim casts a long shadow over Leonard’s face from his position behind Leonard’s head.

“I guess I am,” Jim answers, pushing Leonard’s sunglasses down his forehead and over his eyes. Leonard twists around, arm bracing on the back of the bench, knee hitching up on the seat. He reaches out and tugs at Jim’s belt loop, pulling Jim against the wood.

“That’s okay. You make up for it with that sunny disposition of yours,” Leonard says, teasing though watching Jim closely as well.

“I can be sunny.”

“Sure you can, darlin’, but right now you look like you have no idea what the sun’s even good for.” Leonard doesn’t question him about it and Jim’s thankful for that. There’s nothing worse than complaining about a thoroughly normal day. He reminds himself that he usually likes days like today: no crises, no bad behavior from his kids, no meetings, and no angry parents.

Jim takes Leonard’s hand from his hip and twines their fingers together. He walks to the front of the bench, dragging Leonard’s arm along until he’s sitting, too. Leonard exudes heat through the thin plaid shirt he’s wearing rolled up to the elbows. Jim likes that detail more than he cares about the weather or his own bad attitude. He has a particular affinity for the jut of Leonard’s wrist bones, but Leonard has a funny idea about date etiquette and refuses to wear anything less than cuffed shirts and blazers during them. Jim had planned on going back to Leonard’s bar just to see Leonard in something other than his classically casual and perfectly respectable date night uniform. This does the trick nicely.

Jim’s gaze slides to Leonard’s face and settles there while Leonard looks the other way, staring rather intently at a few wildflowers growing up out of the perfectly manicured grass nearby.

“You ever think we spend too much time trying to control everything?” Leonard asks out of nowhere, turning his head, catching Jim in full voyeur mode. Whatever he sees causes him to avert his eyes again.

“I don’t know,” Jim says, startled. He doesn’t think Leonard’s talking about him, but he might as well be for how close the question stings. “Probably.”

“Yeah,” he answers vaguely, patting Jim’s knee with their joined hands. “Come on. Let’s get that coffee.” He releases his grip and stands, holding his hand out immediately for Jim to take again.

The walk—five minutes, all told—loosens the hold of Jim’s mood. Jim doesn’t know how Leonard knew what he needed in order to crack through it as he would have never have thought to do this for himself. They pass a handful of quaint and neat boutiques where brilliant, rainbow-colored trinkets brawl for attention in the windows. Those baubles distract a number of children; their parents stand behind them pecking at their phones while they wait for the mesmeric effect to fade.

Outside Coller Point, Leonard holds the door open for him.

Jim comes here sometimes, not often enough, and especially loves the floor-to-ceiling bookcase that occupies the wall to the left of the counter as well as the plush and ratty chairs directly in front of it. Leonard once again catches him looking, but this time at those chairs and the books which is both more and less embarrassing than the incident earlier.

Leonard nods in that direction. “Why don’t you grab some seats, Jim? I got this,” he says, gesturing at the short line in front of them. “Americano, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Jim says, surprised. The only time he’d had coffee in Leonard’s presence was when he’d forced Leonard to stop at a Starbucks after a movie. Date number two. He hadn’t even known Leonard was paying attention.

“Sure you don’t want anything more thrilling? My treat. You can go hog wild if you like. I won’t judge.”

“I like my coffee to taste like coffee,” Jim answers.

“Suit yourself,” Leonard answers easily. “Get those seats then.”

“Aye, Captain,” he says, winding around a few tables in order to reach the chairs and that bookcase. A young woman stands at the shelves and he shrugs out of his blazer, holding awkwardly to his bag’s strap, so he can drape the blazer over one chair and drop the bag into the other. Happy with his show of dibs, he walks up to the wall of books and smiles at the woman. She’s lovely up close, brown-skinned with a severe ponytail and winged eyeliner that impresses him. She returns his attention with a brief, tight smile, but otherwise does nothing.

He skims the books instead of engaging in conversation; she’s clearly not interested. And he doesn’t want to give the wrong impression to her or to Leonard. His promise holds for all of a minute, which is when he notices the slim book she’s carrying.

He’d know that cover anywhere: the thin, delicate blue of an anatomical drawing of the bones of the hand in the upper right-hand corner. The stark white background. The letters printed in unobtrusive lowercase centered two-thirds of the way down in that same blue.

“Excuse me,” he says. “May I see that?” He points at the book.

She raises her eyebrow, but hands it over. He flips past the publisher’s credits, the dedication, and the page with the only indication that a living person wrote it—an HM graces that blank page, initials, no doubt, that Jim has never resolved into a full name—skips to the middle, where the title poem lives.

“You’ve read him before?” the woman asks.

“How do you know it’s a him?” Jim answers. He’s more intent on the familiar words before him, the comfort they offer, than the question and his answer, but he looks up when her ponytail shakes in his periphery in time to see her flick a short glance at the line of people ordering. Jim mirrors her action. The only thing he sees is Leonard up there speaking to the cashier.

“Oh,” she says. “He’s, uh, a local. And he’s here. You didn’t know?”

Jim loses the ability to speak for a moment. His mouth dries and his heart threatens to claw its way out of his ribcage and his stomach swoops sickly. “I only moved here in July,” he says.

“Oh!” she says, warming to Jim a bit in the way most people do when they get to share exciting information. It’s nice and all, but he really needs a minute. “Lucky you. He’s ordering his coffee right now.”

Jim’s torso complains as it twists right along with the rest of him when he cranes his neck, hoping to catch someone else at the front of that line. But it’s still Leonard; he’s paying with a debit card and says something to the cashier that makes her laugh. “That guy? Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure.”

“Do you know him?”

The woman shakes her head. “Not personally. Back in college one of my professors mentioned he comes here and pointed him out to me.” She shrugs. “Not too many people care about the lives of poets here in the middle of nowhere, I guess.”

“I care,” Jim says.

“Clearly,” she says. She peeks over his shoulder and nods. “Maybe you ought to say hello.”

Jim turns for a third time and sees Leonard walking toward them, one ceramic cup in each hand. “Yeah, I think I’ll do that. Thank you—”

“Uhura,” the woman— _Uhura_ —answers.

“Jim,” he answers. He lifts the book. “You want this back?”

“No, keep it,” she says, nodding quickly and smiling brightly at Leonard, who watches her leave with a confused look on his face.

“What—” Leonard says before his eyes hone in on the book Jim’s still got in a tight grip between his fingers. “ _Ah_.”

“Yeah, ah,” Jim says in a low, desperate whisper, waving the book at Leonard. “You wrote this? I had to find out you write poetry from a woman in a coffee shop? Not just poetry, but _this_ poetry. I teach English! Why didn’t you lead with that?”

Leonard snorts and sets the cups on the table between the two chairs. “I woulda gotten around to telling you.”

“When?”

Leonard takes one chair and looks up at him, a puzzled half-frown on his face. “I dunno. Some time. Not like anyone’s read it. It’s not a big deal. I didn’t even think about it honestly.”

“ _I read it_ ,” Jim says, falling into the opposite seat. He leans toward Leonard over the armrest and plants one hand on the table and despairs of the fact that Leonard actually looks like it doesn’t matter to him, like he had forgotten about it, and for one irrational moment Jim feels like it’s him that doesn’t matter to Leonard. “And it is a big deal.”

Leonard’s eyes widen once he realizes Jim’s serious. “Jim?”

A disbelieving laugh escapes from Jim. “You don’t even know. Christ. I don’t know what I’d be doing if it wasn’t for that book.” He tosses it on the table between them. It slides to the edge on Leonard’s side, almost taking Leonard’s coffee with it. The hollow thump and scratch of it draws the attention of a woman sitting at the table closest to them. “I certainly wouldn’t be teaching English to a bunch of high school kids.”

“Sounds like I did you a disservice,” he says dryly, picking the book up. He lets it fall into in his lap. Once it’s there, his hand hovers as though he’s afraid to touch it anymore. Jim immediately wants to take it back. He feels like it belongs to him. That book has always belonged to him.

“You don’t understand. Did you know most kids with allergies who want to join the Air Force get a waiver? I’m not most kids and I certainly didn’t get that waiver.”

“You wanted to join the Air Force?” Leonard asks, curious and cautious. Jim knows he’s making less sense than usual right now, but context is everything as he likes to tell his students. Leonard will get it here in a second.

“I loved planes. I wanted to be an Air Force pilot.”

“How did…?” Leonard briefly touches the cover of the book finally. “What happened?”

“I spent eight years chasing that feeling when I found out I couldn’t. Majored in aerospace engineering. Worked for a firm after graduation. I couldn’t even look at a plane without feeling sick. When I was 26 and fed up and picking fucking fights more weekends than not, I found that book. _Your_ book. I don’t even know why I looked at it in the first place. But it’s the only thing that ever made me think I could recover from the disappointment. Ended up taking a few literature classes since it’d been a while—I minored in English, right? I like reading. Why not? Went for my Master’s and some teaching credentials and here I am.”

He leans forward again, this time stretching all the way across the table, and snatches the book from Leonard’s lap, surprising himself with his own ferocity. Of all the ways he’d expected to tell Leonard about his crushed childhood dreams, this hadn’t been it. Defending HM’s book to HM himself never even registered as a possibility. Hell, he’d tell Leonard about worse for the sake of this book. It’d only be fair. “So don’t you tell me it’s not a big deal, Leonard McCoy.”

“I—” Leonard says after a long pause. He rubs his palm over his ear while pink flares over his cheekbones. “Jim, I’m not sure what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything. Just don’t belittle your words,” Jim says. “They’re important to me.”

Leonard picks up his no longer steaming cup of coffee and takes a sip, grimacing at it, perhaps more for something to do than because he wants to drink it.

“You never published anything else?” Jim asks eventually. He’s pretty sure he knows the answer. Unless he’d written under another pseudonymous name, there’s no other work by HM out there. Jim knows. He still checks sometimes.

“I never even intended to publish _those_ ,” Leonard admits. He looks up at the ceiling and breathes deeply. “When I was little I was always scribbling away at something or other. My dad and I played this game where he’d point out some object and I’d have to tell him a story about it.” Leonard laughs. “He always loved those goddamned stories.

“He was a doctor. And I wanted to grow up to be just like him. I think he was a little disappointed. Thought I was giving up on something special by going into medicine. But I loved medicine and I loved him. And it’s not like you can take on medicine as a hobby. Sometimes you gotta compromise.

“I still wrote when I could though and I’d always show him what I was doing.”

Leonard closes his eyes briefly, the skin around his forehead wrinkling in consternation. “Then he got sick. Terminal.” Leonard looks around then, seems to notice the people around them for the first time since he started talking. He stands up, finally showing his eyes to Jim. “We’re gonna have to go somewhere else to finish this conversation.”

“You don’t have to—” Jim answers, scrambling to his feet. Worry circulates through his body, settling nowhere, diffusing evenly to all his parts, giving him nothing concrete to focus on.

“No, I started it,” Leonard says, taking the book from Jim so he can reshelve it. “Might as well finish. There’s never gonna be a good time for it and you know all the important bits anyway.”

Jim follows Leonard into the street, where his nervousness guts him. He has no idea how an impromptu coffee date turned into this. He’s not very good at expressing his support and they aren’t even dating officially. What if he oversteps? Or understeps? And he owes so much to Leonard now. Whatever Leonard has to say can't be good. What if Leonard expects something from him? What if Jim disappoints himself in his handling of this?

Then Leonard threads his fingers between Jim’s and squeezes, breaking Jim’s tension when Jim couldn’t do it himself. Leaning close he continues speaking. It must be easier for him out here: his voice goes low and calm, clear. Steady. “Toward the end he asked me to help him die. The pain had diminished him so much by then. I should have—

“I honestly didn’t think he had that long left. And I didn’t want to rob myself of time with him.

“He hung in there for a month and every day he would beg me to end his suffering. And I clung to my oath to do no harm, ignored his right to make his own decisions about his life when he had no power to see to them for himself.

“I couldn’t think of myself as a doctor after that. How could I help other people when I couldn’t get over myself long enough to help my own father?” Leonard tightens his grip on Jim’s hand and Jim holds just as tightly right back. “After… well, he’d always wanted me to try to have my work published. It’s the only thing left I could do for him. I’d tended bar in college—was a bit of a liquor buff back in the day, thought I knew everything there is to know about whiskey—liked it enough to come back to it. Got some pieces together, wrote a few more, and then, well. A bunch of no’s and one yes later, you got yourself a published book.”

Jim tugs Leonard closer so he can thread his arm around Leonard’s elbow. Words fail him; he’s not the poet here. And he’d never been much of a writer. He much prefers the reading of beautiful language to creating it. Maybe Leonard would know what to say if their situation was reversed. When Jim sneaks a look at him though he’s just watching the people they pass on the sidewalk, apparently unconcerned with Jim’s inability to find anything worth saying.

“Jim?” Leonard asks, hesitant.

“Yeah?”

“I saw plenty of people’s bodies betray them in my time. It’s never easy. I’m sorry it happened to you,” he replies.

Jim turns his attention toward the shop fronts on his left, tells himself there’s something of interest to see there. It should be easy to reciprocate. Jim empathizes—deeply—with the way Leonard’s circumstances have made his chosen life’s work inconceivable to him. But in the jumble of his thoughts, there’s not one thing he can think of that encompasses everything he wishes he could say.

“I wish you hadn’t needed to write your book,” Jim says, hoping this declaration conveys enough of what he means because he’s got nothing else.

===

“Bones, what are you doing?” Jim asks, all but bouncing into the room where Bones is busy pulling stack of wire-bound notebooks from a metal box. Multicolored pages of loose-leaf sheets hang from many of them. Those ones bulge and they all range from mangy to pristine and every stage of use between the two.

“I got somethin’ for you,” he answers.

“What is it?” Jim asks, walking up to Bones and the notebooks.

“Take a look.”

Jim does as he’s told, carefully opening the cover on the topmost notebook. The date scrawled across the top is from less than six months ago—after they started seeing one another—and the painfully precise penmanship is all Bones when he’s trying to ensure his writing is legible. “Are these—?”

“Mmhmm.”

“I thought you quit.”

“I never _quit_. I just never saw the need to submit anything. It was never s’posed to be about publishing.”

“Do you want it to be?”

Bones slaps Jim’s shoulder with the back of his hand before heading for the door. “Don’t get ahead of yourself. Just read the damned things.”

“You already know what I’m going to say,” Jim says, catching up to him in two long strides. He pulls at Bone’s heavy wool sweater, stopping him from reaching the hallway. “You wouldn’t have brought it up if you weren’t willing to be convinced.”

“Maybe I wanted to do something nice for you.” Bones gives the notebooks a suspicious glare. “Though why you’d consider something like this nice is beyond me. Who’d want to look at all that? I don’t even want to look at it.”

Jim’s cheeks twitch with the effort to lock his smile behind a straight face. Bones has offered up scraps of old writing in cramped installments over the last few months. Snippets of prose and poetry that leave Jim wanting to do something—carve them in stone, engrave them in strips of platinum, send them to a goddamned publisher to be printed like most humans would want them to be. He’d think Bones does it—winds him up with those tiny what ifs and half-starts—on purpose, except Bones exudes humble terror whenever he frees each penned slip, as though turning them over to Jim could damn them to a life of abandonment and mockery.

Jim guesses Bones got over that sometime between the start of what Jim’s starting to think was a desensitization campaign and now. Or he’s better at hiding it. Or he wants it done with and finds the ‘let’s just rip the bandage off, shall we?’ school of getting things accomplished an inspiration all of a sudden.

He grabs Bones by the shoulders and holds him at arm’s length. “It _is_ a burden,” he says, mustering as much solemnity as possible. He can’t summon much admittedly, not with all this giddy excitement spinning around his heart, but at least now if Bones lights anything on fire with his eyes it’ll be Jim. Jim’s about five seconds from respectfully ripping into those pages after all. He’d like to keep them safe from Bones’s wrathful stare for as long as possible. This is his birthday, Christmas, and the day after Halloween all rolled up into one. He’d hate to have to break up with Bones over spontaneous combustion of precious artifacts.

“I’m leaving now,” Bones says, backing out of Jim’s loose grip. “Gonna go find a sane person to talk to.”

“Sounds like a long-term project,” Jim says.

“You’re a pain in the ass.”

Jim winds his arm around Bones’s waist and reels him back. He kisses the corner of Bones’s downturned mouth. “Thanks, Bones.”

“Yeah,” Bones offers begrudgingly, pushing at Jim’s face with his hand.

“Now go teach Uhura about mint juleps or whatever it is you two do together. You and I both know she’s the only sane person either of us knows. You act like they grow on trees around here.” Jim releases his hold on Bones and cracks his knuckles theatrically. “Gotta lot of reading to do and you’re getting in the way of it.”

“I’m in the way?” Bones ask, skeptical.

“Yeah.”

“That’s real beautiful, Jim. I’m touched.”

Jim looks at Bones expectantly until Bones finally gives up in a huff and stalks down the hallway toward the living room.

“I like you sometimes,” he yells as he opens the front door.

“Love you, too, Bones!” Jim yells back, staring at this massive accumulation of Bones’s work. A years’ old dream of Jim’s. Right here. In front of him. Just waiting. He hasn’t heard the door shut though and goes to investigate the hold up. He peeks his head into the hallway and sees Bones standing in the door frame, outlined by the late-morning light.

“What?” he asks.

“I hope you—that all that stuff is everything you want it to be.”

“It’s yours,” Jim says. “Don’t worry about it. It’s already everything I want it to be.”

===

bone saws

i took a scalpel to my heart  
and tried to cut away the pieces that serve no purpose  
turns out there arent that many  
and surgery cant fix everything

theres no market for slices of that grief torn muscle  
and tossing those tissues of knotted scars in the trash  
seems a harsh punishment  
for an organ just doing its job too well

better to gather the remaining bits  
and stitch them up with whatever holds the seam together  
theres no need to split those fine protective rib bones  
they can do the heavy lifting til the cracks are filled with gold

**Author's Note:**

> This is really self-indulgent and my thanks go out to anyone who made it all the way to the end.


End file.
